Uber Agrees to Pay Waymo $245 Million Equity to Settle Suit

Uber agreed to give Waymo about $245 million in closely held stock to cut short a trade-secret theft trial, ending a high-stakes conflict that already cost the ride-hailing giant its top driverless car engineer and threatened to further embarrass the company, according to Bloomberg.

The deal will give the Alphabet driverless-car unit 0.34 percent of Uber equity, Waymo said. The actual value of those illiquid shares will depend on how Uber is valued when it goes public, something the company has said it aims to do in late 2019. SoftBank just completed a $9.3 billion deal with Uber in which it valued Uber’s shares at a blended $54 billion valuation. At that price, the settlement is worth $184 million. Alphabet already owns Uber shares since it invested in the company in 2013.

Waymo alleged that one of its senior engineers, Anthony Levandowski, hatched a plan in 2015 with Uber for him to steal more than 14,000 proprietary files, including the designs for lidar technology that helps driverless cars see their surroundings. In four days of testimony this week, of which former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick spent three hours on the stand, it became clear how difficult it would be to prove those claims.

Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s CEO, said in a letter his job is to set the course for the future of the company and expressed regret over the ordeal. “To our friends at Alphabet: we are partners, you are an important investor in Uber, and we share a deep belief in the power of technology to change people’s lives for the better. Of course, we are also competitors. And while we won’t agree on everything going forward, we agree that Uber’s acquisition of Otto could and should have been handled differently.“

A spokesman for Waymo said the company “reached an agreement with Uber that we believe will protect Waymo’s intellectual property now and into the future. We are committed to working with Uber to make sure that each company develops its own technology.“ Waymo was seeking as much as $1.86 billion in damages and a court order barring Uber from using the technology in dispute.